


into corresponding shapes

by elderflowergin



Series: two-headed dragon [3]
Category: Hyena (TV 2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27122140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elderflowergin/pseuds/elderflowergin
Summary: She protected Ms Jung’s secrets with as much care as Ms Jung had protected hers, once.(or, Ji-eun: observing)
Relationships: Jung Geum-ja & Lee Ji-eun, Lee Ji-eun & Na Yi-jun
Series: two-headed dragon [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882501
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	into corresponding shapes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thefeastandthefast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefeastandthefast/gifts).



> Thank you, @thefeastandthefast, for artfully whipping this into shape.

Things hadn’t been the same since Ms Jung and Mr Yoon returned from the States, having lost out on an important joint venture opportunity. 

That, in itself, didn’t make much of a dent. In Ji-eun’s mind, it was two major things: the Great Renovation, and the Great Separation. 

The Great Renovation was the more innocuous of the two. Ms Jung came into the office one morning and told her to look for a new space. That made sense, because expansion had been on the agenda regardless of the joint venture outcome. 

What didn’t make sense was the proposed configuration of the office. At Choong’s old office, they sat across from each other and chatted constantly, frequently visiting each other’s desks. Mr Yoon once made and flew paper planes over to Ms Jung’s desk just to annoy her. 

Ji-eun would have thought that no matter where they moved, the partners would need to be close to each other - 

“So let’s partition this space,” suggested Ms Jung. “Let’s retain the balcony, but divide the space into two, with a glass partition, and blinds on both sides.” 

Ji-eun was confused. Firstly, Mr Yoon wasn’t at the walk-through - he was at a client meeting, and he’d given blanket approval to Ms Jung. So they didn’t hate each other, but still - 

“Boss, we could just not have a partition and put you at opposite ends - wouldn’t you prefer your old position? You do like to discuss things,” she advised. 

Ms Jung, avoidant and hiding it rather poorly, looked over the plans for the new office. “Ji-eun,” she started. 

“Yes, boss?” 

“Let’s get that partition and blinds in, okay? If we’re splitting files, we need privacy from each other. I spoke to Mr Yoon about it,” she concluded, breezily walking away. 

“You’re splitting files?” She called after Ms Jung, but there was no answer forthcoming. 

(The Great Separation was even more surprising to Ji-eun. Ms Jung and Mr Yoon loved getting each other’s input on virtually everything, fighting over every aspect of file management. Mr Yoon once screeched in frustration over Ms Jung’s haphazard Post-It classifications. Splitting meant they were pursuing clients separately and taking their own approaches - more to the point, Ji-eun knew it might mean splitting lawyers along communal lines too. Mr Na would be a casualty for sure.)

Ji-eun decided to compare notes with Sang-mi on their bosses’ pitches. Ms Jung was pursuing exclusively private companies - the newly-established, the upstarts, the ones with notoriously troubled boards and bickering family members. Mr Yoon went for meetings with ministry secretariats and assemblymen, and it was clear even without Sang-mi’s input when he had those meetings: he dressed like he was going to court, in conservative dark colours, with a crisp white shirt and a tie pin and understated cufflinks. Was there some sort of bizarre competition going on? No one could quite tell. 

There was the other thing; the not-talking. Before, they’d be yelling at each other across the common area and then try to recruit anyone dimwitted enough to pass by into their arguments. Now, it seemed as though they got along splendidly - Mr Yoon said it often himself: “Ms Jung is fine with it, I spoke to her,” as he adjusted his Windsor knot and smoothed down his tie, and sure, good for them, good for the business too - except they didn’t do it in the presence of anybody else. 

If they at all spoke, it was somewhere no one had ever noticed them doing it. 

-

“So, something’s not right, right?” Sang-mi asked, subtle as a wrecking ball, and everyone else paused. 

They met like this every third Friday of the month, away from the office and off-the-books; Ms Jung believed it was essential for them to meet on their own and without the bosses; Mr Yoon’d made several failed attempts to find out the location of their meetings. It had gotten to the point where Sang-mi was purposefully not given the location of the meeting so Mr Yoon wouldn't be able to bribe it out of her. (The bribes were far more persuasive than any of Mr Yoon’s threats, which tended to be as empty as they were bombastic in their delivery). 

An awkward silence, broken by the sizzling pork and the fizz of someone’s soft drink, continued until Sang-mi spoke again. “They don’t talk anymore. I mean, they’re not fighting, but they don’t talk anymore. And all the file splitting. What’s happening?” 

“They want to optimise our strengths depending on which client we’re working with,” explained Mr Na. “I think it’s their new strategy.” 

“Is their new strategy also not talking to each other?” asked Sang-mi in all seriousness. 

Mr Na shrugged, eyes darting at her. “They’re weird like that. At each other’s throats one day, and...at each other’s throats the next day.” 

Everyone looked to Mr Kim, who’d been suspiciously quiet. He looked up from the grill, cleared his throat and held up his hands. “All I know is it happened during that American conference. They came back and made changes to the partnership agreement - which, if any of you read my management updates - you’d know all about.” 

Ms Boo exclaimed. “Well, I have an excuse since I’m not in the firm. Wait, is this why he’s picked up the violin?“

(Ji-eun wasn’t entirely surprised by the request for a soundproof room - all the better for them to yell at each other - and for other things! - she thought, until Ms Jung looked confused about it and as it turned out, it was for Mr Yoon to practise at the office without disturbing anyone else.)

“The violin?”

“Yes,” nodded Ms Boo. “He’s driving Min-a up the wall.” Min-a was the third of Ms Boo’s six half-sisters; all seven girls hung out together all the time, wore each other’s clothes and wandered in and out of each other’s houses. 

“I once tried to pick up the guitar after a breakup,” commented Mr Na. “I wasn’t very good at it.”

“With Yoo-jin, you mean? I thought she was mean to waiters,” asked Ms Boo. “You needed to learn an instrument to get over her?” 

Mr Na frowned, deep in thought. “Are you thinking of Eun-joo? She was the one who was mean to waiters. That lasted two dates.”

“It’s very challenging keeping track of your conquests, Na-byun,” remarked Ms Boo. 

He shrugged philosophically. “I find it hard to say no, that’s all.” 

“Mr Yoon isn’t great with the violin, either,” replied Sang-mi, long-suffering. “You should carry on with the guitar if your passion lies there, but also only if you’re good at it eventually.” 

“Do we classify this as a breakup, then?” asked Mr Na. 

Mr Kim threw back his soju and looked directly around at the lawyers and secretaries. “If they couldn’t get along anymore, I don’t think they’d still be working together,” he said with perspicacity. 

“It’s even smoother now than it used to be,” said Mr Na, sounding discomfited by it even as he said it. “Maybe the breakup - or whatever it was - was a good idea?” 

“Look, they’re both too good not to strive for something better than getting clients off YouTube, so I think this is a positive development,” concluded Mr Kim. 

It was hard for Ji-eun to imagine that anything could break them up, if the Disaster Known As Kim Hee-sun did not. 

-

The Disaster Known As Kim Hee-sun - Ji-eun called it that, but it didn’t really sound right to her ear - it sounded like a comedy, which Ji-eun supposed was possible from the outside. (It was decidedly not so from the inside.) 

The thing was, Ji-eun would do many things for Ms Jung, and she’d do them again, because Ms Jung was there for her when she had no one else - when she thought the walls were closing in on her, and that was the end - and swept her into her arms, and took care of her, and rubbed her back when she was throwing up and didn’t seem to mind the smell of sick, didn’t even wrinkle her nose or move away - she just stayed, and Ji-eun would follow her to the end of the world for that. 

She would never repeat the Disaster Known As Kim Hee-sun, though, because here was the thing - the Disaster worked as a comedy only if Yoon Hee-jae was the sort of man who deserved being deceived and to have his heart ripped out of him the way Kim Hee-sun did, and Ji-eun felt very strongly that he did not, by the end of it. 

He was - at least originally - the perfect target: smug, rising young lawyer with a Midas touch, so he thought he was unbeatable; exactly the sort that was ripe for pickings. 

Nothing really distinguished Mr Yoon from any of the other wealthy, well-connected lawyers who represented extremely shitty people with a pathological lack of ethics. He did the same things they did; dressed like them in made-to-measure Dunhill and Brunello Cucinelli, went to Bikram yoga on Saturdays and CrossFit on weekday evenings, spent Sunday mornings at the same country club and dated the same doe-eyed heiresses with ceramic curls and porcelain skin who appeared in the pages of Tatler modelling forgettable artisanal jewellery.

(There was one superficial difference, as Ms Jung once pointed out very clinically when she caught Ji-eun re-watching one of his interviews for the eighth or ninth time in the name of research, “Well, if the law doesn’t work out, he could always go into TV with that face.” 

Ji-eun had nearly spilt her tea all over her beat-up keyboard. “Boss, it’s just -- I thought I saw something important -- I’ll turn it off.” 

Ms Jung had waved it off. “No, no, keep playing,” she’d said, running a finger absently across a non-existent smudge on Ji-eun’s screen as she watched him. The camera flashes only served to highlight the sweep of his cheekbone, his brow; his fingers adjusted his perfect Windsor knot as he spoke in his crisp, made-for-TV baritone with a patented smirk on his face.) 

He was supposed to be a narcissistic horror like the rest, not an exception to it -- except -- 

Sang-mi was with her outside the courthouse one freezing Tuesday morning, talking about having missed a date for filing a client’s papers. It was maybe her second month working for him, and she’d spent a week looking completely distressed, like she was expecting Song & Kim to set her on fire when the dust had settled. 

“He’s not firing you, though,” Ji-eun’d asked, incredulous. She had already been asking Ms Jung for leads on where Sang-mi could go next. Secretaries came and went - it was the lawyers who were indispensable in this world, impenetrable. 

“He’s not. He said he already spoke to management and sorted it out,” replied Sang-mi, equally dubious. “I don’t understand. He’s one of the top lawyers there. He’ll make partner next, if the rumours are true - the youngest in Song & Kim’s history.” 

Ji-eun cheered for her. “That’s good, right? Hey, let’s celebrate. You’ve been looking so worried lately.” 

Sang-mi still looked confused. “I don’t know why he’d stand up for me like that. I don’t understand it at all. People were warning me before I joined. Even his own friend,” she’d whispered. “Why would he do that?” 

It was perhaps then, Ji-eun thought, that they’d made a serious miscalculation. 

Worse than that, she suspected Ms Jung had made a major miscalculation herself. 

-

If Ms Jung burned orange; Kim Hee-sun was distinctly blue. Kim Hee-sun - prior to her heartbreaking days - was a persona she only occasionally adopted to get information or gain entry into otherwise-exclusive establishments. All she needed were extensions, slightly more makeup than usual and a nice dress. Everything else was in Ms Jung’s gestures; the slightly inclined head, the swinging hips and her apples-and-cyanide voice.

One morning, Ji-eun unlocked the office to find Kim Hee-sun sitting on the coach, hugging her knees. The hem of her violet velvet dress gathered around her ankles; her knuckles were white around a glass of soju. Ji-eun realised with a shiver that the woman on the couch did not seem familiar; she looked like Kim Hee-sun, but Kim Hee-sun never existed in the early hours of the morning like this, a beautiful wreck. She looked like a woman either trying to forget something or fortify herself; and for a brief, chilling moment Ji-eun thought that perhaps Yoon Hee-jae had hurt her. 

She turned to Ji-eun then, tilting her head the exact way - she had to have been imagining it, right? - Yoon Hee-jae did in one of his TV interviews, when answering a question from a particularly critical reporter. “I just need a minute,” she’d whispered, voice an extinguished flame. 

-

“Boss, maybe he’s not that bad,” she’d said tentatively to Ms Jung a few days later, after the dust from Glitch-in-the-Kim-Hee-Sun-Matrix had settled. 

Ms Jung looked up from where she was working. “What do you mean?” 

“Mr Yoon,” she clarified. “Maybe he’s not that bad. Do you want to find another way? I can do it, you know. I can learn -- hacking, or something.” 

It was telling that Ms Jung sighed and pushed her papers away, running her hand through her hair. “Does it matter, Ji-eun? If he’s not that bad, does it matter?” 

She’d nodded. “Yes, I think it does.”

There was a slight smile on Ms Jung’s face at that. “You’re young. I forget that sometimes. If he’s not bad, do we just stop? So he didn’t fire your friend. So what? It means someone else has always done the dirty work for him, because he’s the grandson of a Chief Justice, because his father will be the next Chief Justice. Just because he doesn’t know about it doesn’t make him less bad than the rest. It makes him worse still, because his hands have to be clean at someone else’s expense. Does that make sense?”

Ji-eun nodded, but she hadn’t been very convinced at all. 

-

Ji-eun and Mr Na herded Sang-mi into a taxi to get her back home. They chatted over a sleeping Sang-mi, who had her head comfortably ensconced on Ji-eun’s lap. She absently patted Sang-mi’s hair as Mr Na spoke. 

“I hope we still get to work on files together, even if there’s a split between Ms Jung and Mr Yoon,” he said, with little guile. “I enjoy working with you.” 

She looked out of the window, the fluttering street-lights a distraction from his words. “Hey, I’m sure we will. Don’t worry about it. We’ll still see each other around the office, right?” 

Ji-eun suddenly felt her stomach - or maybe all the soju - turn to ice water. Mr Na had only really asked about work, hadn’t he? It was not like he wanted to see her around even if there were no joint files to work on. That wasn’t what he said. She really had to drink less at these outings. Mr Na’s sobriety was a liability in these situations. 

“Of course we will. And at these outings, and you know, whenever we have lunch or dinner or coffee together. I’m sure it’s temporary anyway,” he reassured her with a smile as they reached Sang-mi’s apartment building. 

Ji-eun nodded. “Yeah.” 

They woke her up a little, then hoisted her arms over their shoulders to support her as they walked her into the building. 

“I should really tell her to drink less,” said Ji-eun, remonstrative as she bowed gently. “I appreciate your help.” 

“Hey, it’s okay. She has to de-stress too,” he said. “It’s not easy, working for Mr Yoon.” 

“He’s been a good boss to her,” she demurred, feeling strangely like she should stand up for him. 

“He is, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy,” replied Mr Na. 

They deposited her in her room, kept a glass of water by her bedside and tiptoed in relative silence out the door.

-

They walked towards the main road, a Sang-mi-sized space between them. Mr Na wore his backpack on his left shoulder, and it bumped into Ji-eun every so often. He didn’t seem to notice. 

“Do you ever think you might want to do something else?” 

Ji-eun frowned at the question. “You mean, working for someone other than Ms Jung?”

Mr Na laughed. It was a delightful sound. “No, I mean - something other than being a paralegal.” 

She paused, then spoke before she could think it through. “Well, I used to wonder what law school would be like,” she answered with a shrug, offhand and casual, already feeling the rising discomfort from having said it out loud. 

Mr Na stopped walking and turned to her, a brilliant smile blooming on his face. “That sounds amazing. What’s the pathway like? You should see if your paralegal courses offer some credit. I did fine on the LSATs, but I heard Ms Boo had the best system in her class for memorising, so you should talk to her. I have the books, when - if - well -” He seemed to see something in Ji-eun’s face that made him stop, and he looked sheepish. “Sorry. I got carried away, didn’t I? No pressure, honestly.”

“No, Mr Na, that was very kind of you. I appreciate it. I’m still very far from that point, though,” she said with a nod. “Earlier -- you said it’s temporary,” she queried. “Why did you say that?” 

He shrugged. “I can tell he misses her, even though she’s right next door. You agreed with me, though.” 

Ji-eun made a squeaking noise. “What?”

“You agreed with me, back then.” 

Ms Jung met with a client the day before, a Kevin Jung-type venture capitalist with a smooth voice and a flirtatious smile. What would Ms Jung normally do? Flirt back; offer her most charming steel-laden smiles and use her ways to draw out more information than was readily offered. 

What did she do instead? “If we could just stick to the matter at hand, Director,” she’d said, voice cold and forbidding, as if she no longer had the blood for that sort of thing. 

Perhaps most telling of all: the bottle of shiraz that rested in her cupboard; an alcohol that Ms Jung rarely drank to her knowledge. It wasn’t even stored properly - Mr Yoon was going to have kittens if he ever spotted it. It rested vertically on a music program for a concert she knew Ms Jung had never attended because she was busy at the time having Ippudo ramen in the East Village and posting Instagram stories of her noodles from different angles. 

She knew better than to trust that those things added up to the same conclusion Mr Na had reached. Even if they did, she protected Ms Jung’s secrets with as much care as Ms Jung had protected hers, once. 

Ji-eun smiled absently at Mr Na. “No reason, really. I was agreeing with something else you said.” She quickly checked her watch. “I should get going,” she said with a wave of her fingers. 

“I’m taking a cab - I can give you a lift,” said Mr Na, checking his phone. 

She threw a thumbs-up in his direction and turned away. 

Just in time for the last train home, she thought, speeding off into the night with a smile on her face.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who was wondering: the scene of Kim Hee-sun in her violet dress, soju in hand, is set in the same 'verse as No Secrets, thefeastandthefast's sharply-rendered, gorgeous and quietly melancholy telling of their first time together which I'm sure everyone has read by now! (And if you haven't, somehow, please read it now! It is rated E, thank goddesses).
> 
> The title is from Such Great Heights by The Postal Service.


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